


In Appreciation of Art History

by JohnlockAndATardis



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Art, Blood and Gore, Canon Divergence, Diverges after 2x4, F/F, If you like internal monologues that's what you're getting ngl, Lots of Murder, Murder Queens, Museums, Slow Burn, Until it isn't, cw: drug use, cw: gore, in which Villanelle develops a style, like seriously slow burn, literally five chapters before these characters interact, obviously
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2020-02-27 07:20:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18734287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnlockAndATardis/pseuds/JohnlockAndATardis
Summary: Eve's been less than attentive as of late, and Villanelle decides that ostentatious presentation is the best solution.-In which Villanelle mimics famous art murders as a way of getting Eve's attention.





	1. Abbozzo

 

 

_**Abbozzo** _

            The first kill is not like, nor unlike, a first high. Villanelle does not believe in all of that nonsense about chasing the initial climax, in trying to replicate its unobtainable peak. The pleasure that is taken from the first comes like the trembling hands of an unskilled lover, fumbling and weak, unaware of how to string it out. Of what parts of the body may in what ways be pulled upon to bring about the sweet melodies, to deliver something approximating ecstasy. With her first kill she did not know how to draw out the process, edging towards the cliff until the moment of sweet bliss, the final satisfaction.

 

            But that does not mean, Villanelle knows, that there is nothing to that first time. Like all youthful rites of passage it has its place. If executed poorly, if the hands are too unsteady, or the heart too fallible, the ceremony is spoiled, this she sees. She knows the prisons in Russia with the wails of those tormented by an act they were not strong enough to commit and commit to – acts that broke them. But for Villanelle it built her, the first exposure executed just right, merging aptitude and attitude with the delight of a new high, something that could only be improved upon. In this it was better than need, or desire, better than a hunger gnawing inside of her body. It became close to art, a scene to be carefully played out, she was the director, the artist, this was hers to perfect. It did not consume her but she consumed it like drinking in the stars, drawing it in as the fire entices the winged beast.

 

            _Oh,_ Villanelle thinks, _how sweet that burn._ How tantalizing, close to addiction, a devious repetition.

 

            And yet, the preoccupation with killing is unlike an addiction in that she knows she will not die if she does not kill. She thinks back on the months she has spent, forced to stay in silence, in the first days when she began to develop her style, before she learned about subtle motifs. Her extravagance, that is her pattern, the elegance of kills the only thing that marks her. In learning that she is allowed to live without such respite, to continue uninhibited.

 

            The preoccupation with killing is _like_ an addiction in that it taints almost every thought. It comes to her like a lullaby at night, the memories of the slowing of the pulse causing her own to react in turn. It comes to her when she is fucking, the beat, beat, beating of their fear, the dilation of the pupils, it is not so unlike the act of killing. We are primal creatures at heart, Villanelle knows. Sex and violence are only mere steps from one another, sometimes divinely blurred…

 

            She fucked Anna on the bed where she killed her husband. For a time, it was her favorite memory to masturbate to, the supreme scent of sex and iron, so primal, so raw. She can still recall it, the entanglement of her and Anna’s bodies, the opening of the door, the silence. His leering eyes, angry and aroused, the first instance in which she had seen the two paired. Villanelle, Oksana then, smaller and weaker than she had allowed herself to be since that day, leaping off the bed. She’d wielded the letter-opener Anna kept by the bed, forced him down upon it. Violent, her knee in his abdomen, the too-dull blade against his throat. She’d given him the option to leave, to take a new name and make like he was dead.

 

            “ _Whore,”_ he’d spat. _Messy,_ the letter-opener dragging with impressive force against his jugular, his arterial spray coating her bare breasts, Anna’s fingers where she’d gripped his locks, tugged back his head, her participation that she’d never admit, Villanelle would not implicate her, Oksana never could. _Sloppy,_ the trail she left on the floor leading from the bed to the tub, the house bearing the scarlet letter for her. _Bloody,_ Anna’s clothing, her flesh as Villanelle brought their bodies together, tossed her upon the bed, shifted the older woman’s minds to thoughts other than what Villanelle had done for her, for them.

 

            Villanelle thinks about it in the museum with Constantine, in the Rijksmuseum, as she passes from De Baen’s oil on canvas towards earlier works. It is there in bold, better than the one that preceded it, the colors alive, the women active, Holofernes’s neck bent backwards as Judith holds the blade to his throat. She feels something tug at the corners of her mouth, a twisted smile taking its place upon her lips, she thinks of Eve. Better than Anna, braver than Anna, Eve stabbed her to prove how much she loved her. To prove that she was better than the weak-willed coward she had once thought she’d loved. But that wasn’t love, that was ~~obsession~~ misplaced devotion. This thing, this with her Eve, this was love. They would kill for each other. She lays in bed at night, her wandering hand fueled by the image of Eve, killing not only for her, but with her. Her body had been the serpent and the apple all at once, Eve had opened a part of herself that she could not close and Villanelle wanted to be the one to teach her how to pry it further. She fantasizes about sharing this with someone for the first time, and Villanelle has always worked alone but she would not mind it with Eve because it would be teaching her. Ruining that godly façade she wears and showing her who she truly was, she had always been Eve who bit the apple she was just waiting to know that.

 

            On her way out, Villanelle picks up two postcards. The first has an image of the two flayed men, the Brothers De Witt, De Baen’s artistry that she will imitate in creation of her new style. The second is the Artemisia, upon the back of which she imprints a simple date. Both are sent to Eve. Neither, she does not learn until later, are received. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed! The art pieces which inspired/are referenced in this chapter are Jan de Baen's "The Corpses of the Brothers de Witt," and Artemisia Gentileschi's "Judith Slaying Holofernes."


	2. À La Poupée

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve hasn't been listening, or watching, or so it seems. Villanelle wants to make the message a little more clear.

 

_**À La Poupée** _

 

**silence**

_(noun)_ the complete absence of sound

            _synonyms:_ quietness, stillness, hush, tranquility

 

            Eve has been silent. No, not silent. Silence is a descriptor which implies a sensation of peace and an absence of conversation. Eve has not been silent then. Last Saturday, she kissed Niko and said goodbye to him, leaving the stain of orange-red lipstick on his cheek. A new shade. She spoke less than three hundred words in a meeting with an old friend in from American for tea, seventeen in conversation with the barista. Eighty-four at the department store where she buys a new dress, plum colored, that clings to her curves in a new way, revealing hidden depths of her body that Villanelle would like to discover. She longs to know how it would be, to mould the palms of her hand to that flesh, to feel it fill her fingers, soft places of give, give, give.

 

            _Take_. Villanelle takes the next job that’s offered to her. Disgruntled stepfather, his wife’s son. He chases the dragon in Germany, two art degrees and nothing to be done with him. Preparing for a kill feels like what she’d imagine preparing for a dance would feel like, if she’d been the dancing type. She’d danced before. Clubs, banquets, when the occasion suited her or, more often, when her position demanded it. Anna used to dance. She was shit at it, had no rhythm in her hips, but it didn’t matter when they were together in the kitchen, in the blue-walled bedroom before Anna painted it, bright like the morning sky she liked how cheerful she said it made her. A long time after, Villanelle couldn’t dance, couldn’t stand blue skies, hated how happy those things made the world.

 

            She dances again as she applies makeup to her face, cheap drugstore crap she’d lifted with ease when the teller was distracted, wouldn’t disgrace herself with purchasing something so low grade, wouldn’t waste the money on it. Villanelle swatches arsenic-yellow eyeshadow on her lids with a languid finger dipped into the plastic pot. She smiles at herself in the mirror, frowns, pulls at her lips with her thumbs and makes a face. Her lips are stained with a gaudy orange hue, she wears torn tights and a too-loose sweater of cream with pulled threads and fraying sleeves, she is wearing another face, another person, another name.

 

            No one notices her as she walks through the streets, dimly lit with what pale amber illumination diffuses through ancient, decrepit streetlights. No one except a few men, black-clad, who whistle as she walks by. Villanelle who is not Villanelle at the moment but someone else, smiles, scarlet pigment rising up her collarbones and into her cheeks, she’s thinking about fucking Eve against that brick wall in that plum dress, tear the cheap fabric that Eve probably thinks is exquisite, let her soft flesh chafe just enough to bleed. The men probably think the color is for them but they don’t pursue and Villanelle almost wishes that they would, wishes she could paint the black pavement burgundy, show them one by one the thin, milky protective cover that shields their organs, strip it away in front of them. But they do not, and she does not.

 

            She finds the den that she’s looking for through an alley off a dank corner street, shoves wadded dollar bills into the hands of the woman that opens the door, rough, her eyes black like coal, hair the same, she smirks at Villanelle and Villanelle replies in a similar way but right now, she’s got a job to do. Through the hallways where emerald takes on a mystic quality, in pursuit of her destination.

 

            The stepson is lost to the world, his eyes staring off into some better space when Villanelle stumbles closer, like she’s one of his kind, like she’s his people. She lays down on the filthy floor, scattering dirty needles she makes sure not to settle onto. Her head leans against the wall, she gazes up to the ceiling and wonders what he sees there. Thinks again about the days before she learned care, when she would settle her boredom in this fashion, upping the dosage just to see how high she could fly before she became an Icarus, what a bullshit myth that was. The sun wasn’t hot enough to melt his wings, ambition was never a sin, his father’s cheap construction was the issue. Constantine had found her a few times in need of being revived, rambling like a fool and she delighted in the real fear in his face, not just worried about the Twelve’s investment.

 

            She liked having someone to care about her, to worry about her. She wonders if Eve worries about her at night. Wonders if this boy’s mother worries about him. He is young, soft face, maybe twenty three, pretty, really. Shame. He could’ve been like, a model or something, yeah? The grating voice of a junkie three doors down taints her thoughts as she grabs a clean needle off the shelf, is this what they pay their money for? Shoot ups by the hour, the day? At least it’s good product, Villanelle considers as she pockets the syringe and procures one of her own. No one is watching, no one cares what she does or who she is, just another face. She lifts his arm and his head briefly twists with cognition, his milky eyes shining as he looks down at his own arm, at the yellow syringe she holds. Smiles, doesn’t seem to realize yet that something’s amiss, mumbles something about smoky bliss, the shambled rooms filled with vaporous concoctions, he isn’t the only one who prefers the old way but they’ll all take it any old way, just for the high to stay.

 

            She chooses a spot on his arm that has a few track marks from when he couldn’t make it here, she presumes. A wyvern chases up his bicep, beautiful green ink rendered upon his flesh, she doesn’t doubt that he’d designed this himself. Villanelle places the needle just under the creature’s claws, shoots him full of fatality. His eyes go wide for a moment, but fall back still. Villanelle glances across the room to the tattered remains of a couch beneath a stunted window, blacked out by newspapers as though that is somehow less suspicious. She drapes him there, stays at his side as his eyes regain some semblance of clarity, death almost always makes the world more real for them. There isn’t much blood, not really, not until the end when he starts gagging, choking on the product of his own failing intestines. The scarlet spills out of his mouth, stains his teeth and then the couch and he reaches out, hands grasping at her, seeming to beg her to become his salvation, Villanelle smiles.

 

            “Da guckst du dumm aus der Wäsche,” she murmurs, standing away from the body. She deposits the contends of the stored syringe into her veins and artfully places the glass on the floor before crushing the one she’d used on the boy beneath her boot. She wanders towards the front where the woman from before was waiting, she almost looks like Eve in this lack-of-lighting and the woman doesn’t seem to mind when she calls her it before pressing her body up against hers. Every person has a vice and this dragon, this hoarder of wealth procures them, provides them, she tastes like mouthwash and top-shelf whiskey, no doubt saves cash providing this shithole instead of somewhere upscale for the pretty twats to stay. Villanelle can appreciate the economy of it and really, they would do it somewhere anyway, better she makes money than they do it on the streets.

 

            Do it on the streets, she can imagine fucking Eve that way, under a red light, gun aimed for anyone who might watch or, would Eve like an audience? It would surprise Villanelle but she’s surprised her in other ways, anyway. This woman is a poor substitute for what Villanelle really wants, she is too much _take, take, take,_ but then the drugs _take_ and she finds herself flying, up out of her body, no one will find the body for hours now, when she will be away and it will be too late.

 

            -

 

            She mails Eve her postcard when her thoughts return to her, when her body becomes her own again. This time she doesn’t sign it, doesn’t write anything, but presses the bright Carnelian bulb of a poppy flower to its back before sending it off. She hopes Eve gets her message. If not, she will have to think bigger, go bigger. Michelangelo will envy her art, and Eve? Eve will eat her heart out, as the Americans say, she thinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed! The piece which inspired this chapter is The Death of Chatterron, by Henry Wallis.


	3. Baroque

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Eve's ignorance and perceived indifference towards the last kill, Villanelle is determined to get her attention, somehow. Things, in turn, get rather biblical.

            Villanelle doesn’t pride herself on subtlety. In fact, it is something she, in general, snubs her nose at. True, when the time calls for it, when the time demands it in the way that, from time to time, capital-punishment worthy crimes are apparently want to do ( _blah_ to that, she thinks into her smoothie) subtlety is something she can achieve. But it doesn’t mean it’s something that Villanelle _enjoys._ She is ostentatious, she is extravagant, she is a goddamned artist! And she will not, will absolutely **not** be ignored by the one patron she seeks.

            Eve Polastri, Villanelle understands, is no stupider than the rest of humanity. In fact, she is quite a bit more clever than almost all of those over-glorified dung beetles who thrive in their own refuse in the sinking shithole of the world that they’ve created or otherwise had created for them, too stupid or too apathetic to do anything about it. Eve Polastri is different. She makes the dark, bleak, gray landscape of this world just a little less awful. She is a beautiful, wonderful, smart, and sometimes funny Asian woman with glorious hair and a whole lot more to her than the rest of the world seems to understand.

            And she is. Fucking. Ignoring. Villanelle. There is absolutely no other term for it, no other way to describe what is going on at the moment. Villanelle has heard about this other woman, this other creature, this other assassin that Konstantin likes to bait her with. “She’s forgotten you, Oksana,” Konstantin likes to say. “This new woman, she’s really caught her eye. You should move on. The only stable thing in this life is the kills, the killing. They die, and then some day the people who pay us will die, I will die, Eve will die, even you will die.”

            Villanelle had drawn a knife on him then, when he’d said that, and by the genuine expression of fear in his eyes she knows they both know it wasn’t her dying that set Villanelle off so quickly (as though she fears death, as though she was like the rest of them, like him, weak, susceptible to these things). As though she was enough of a fool to let him bait her with this stranger, this other woman. Villanelle’s fingers go down to her abdomen, she touches the scar that is still healing there and she smiles. This other woman, whoever she is, can be dispatched. She isn’t an issue, not really. A total _non-_ issue, in fact. Eve would find her and she would be done with her, and that would be the end of it. What Eve is doing now is her job, and that is the thing of it. She is answering to other powers the way Villanelle once did with the Twelve. And Eve doesn’t know how to get away.

            Not ignoring then. But maybe. Maybe Villanelle should send a message, should make sure that Eve sees this one. The last one was public, but in a place with so much scandal to its name that it didn’t really matter, did it? Things go wrong in those places. She needed something better, something more eye-catching, something that would draw the attention away from this non-entity of a woman and back to where it mattered. Villanelle smiles at the thought, her tongue circling the straw, playing with it the way that Villanelle would like for her tongue to circle and play with parts of this woman, this one woman.

            Across the street, church bells ring, a baby cries, and a man rushes past on a bicycle, bits of conversation lost into the mundane blur of the world. Villanelle thinks of her next kill.

-

             She doesn’t usually take pleasure in the kill for the fact of who the person is. She doesn’t care who the person is. De Baen had it right, people are swine. But she has a few soft spots, not weaknesses, she doesn’t have those, but a few points that make her sharpen her knife a little less so that the dull drag can pull a little more on the flesh.

            The man who is hanging upside down before her doesn’t look all that interesting. He doesn’t look like anything. Because he is nothing. Because he is a bacterium in a world where Villanelle is supreme, because he does not matter. But he has done things that matter. She is being paid to dispatch him because of those things. The woman who called for his removal came from the Ukraine, this man from Russia, originally, her home country. She’d included a tale of the woes he had caused and Villanelle always, always hated those ones. They were so mopey, she despised seeing them cry, would laugh at them sometimes or slap them, anything to just make them shut up. This woman hadn’t cried. This woman had been stone faced, straight jawed, untrembling as she’d described how this man had profited from the sale of girls like her sister, how he had left her to rot while they carried off the other sibling, how he’d laughed at her crying and said to save her tears for her own funeral, before shutting the doors and locking her in with the corpses of her dead family. Villanelle doesn’t care for family. Hers were all dead.

            She grips the head of the man and wonders if he ever thought that his deliverance would come like this, in a church in the south of France, a beautiful church, really, one of the few that had survived through the bombings and the wars and the revolutions. The angels that watch overhead Villanelle dismisses as she traces his neck with the blade, humming softly now.

            “Please.” He speaks with a thick Russian accent still, and Villanelle, if she cared, could pick out to the village what cesspool created this man. “Please, I have money.”

            “I have money,” Villanelle mocks him, leaning in so that he can see her properly, so he can take note of the way that she is smiling. “Please, don’t kill me, I have a family, a wife and children. Oh no!” She drops his head and laughs, swaying her hips now to the tune, some song she’d heard on the radio that made her think of Eve, slow and languid, seductive, but she can’t remember its name. She circles him, checks the ties, and then tugs his head back at a painful angle. “Do you know what I just remembered?”

            “What?” the man gasps, his breath coming out like it might be his last. Aptly so, then.

            “Мне плевать на твою семью. Или твои деньги.” _I don’t care about your family. I don’t care about your money._ You are nothing to me, Villanelle thinks.

            “Пожалуйста, нет!” the man cries out, as if by screaming in their native tongue, she might be moved to sympathy. Villanelle laughs, presses his head down into the basin, that deep pool where the baptismal waters were held. He struggles, but has nowhere to go, suspended upside-down and with the pressure of her hand as it is. After a great many moments, the spastic movements of his body shudder to a halt.

            “Aha!” Villanelle shouts to the empty church as his head thunks delightfully against the basin. The song, she remembers it now, as crimson slowly spills into the basin, mingling with the water from the contusions caused by his struggle. The singer’s voice fills her mind, _I need you right here with me, I need you right here with me._ She wonders if Eve would like the song. She wonders if Eve will notice her, now.

-

            An island and several hours away, Eve Polastri opens her laptop to see the figure of a body suspended, spilling blood over the baptismal basin like blasphemous communion wine. As her eyes settle upon the apple which has been placed in his outstretched hand, as if it could somehow save him, she knows that there is only one person this could have been. In spite of herself, Eve smiles. She hasn’t been forgotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed! This was an... interesting chapter for me to write as I found that, with Villanelle's increasing agitation the formality of the voice I wrote her with began to sort of disintegrate, as though it were devolving with her own frustrations, which I think is a very Villanelle thing to have happen. The art piece I referenced for this chapter was Elisabetta Sirani's Timoclea, and the song which Villanelle has stuck in her head is White Blood by Oh Wonder.


	4. Commission

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A job hits a little closer to home than Villanelle might have anticipated, and she reacts accordingly.

            Madness, Villanelle considers, is a constraint of a bounded universe. It is a myth procured for the masses to provide them with gratitude, _at least I have my sanity._ If sanity comes at the cost of pleasure, at the loss of sensual delights, then she has no desire to be described as sane. She is aware of the term the world calls her, her words to Eve echo distantly in her mind, a warning about the use of such words. Villanelle prefers other terms to describe herself – sensual, exquisite, unchained. As she studies her reflection, she wonders what the experts perceive madness to look like. She had based the image of herself for today on a similar question of what an assassin might look like, and as she glances into the dingy shop window for that glimpse of herself, her lips curve into a catlike smile, blowing a kiss at her receptive reflection.

 

            “Perfection,” she tells the image, garbed in black and leather fitted to her body. “Never change.”

 

            “You look ridiculous,” Konstantin chastises her. He is leaning against the wall which precedes the stairwell to the building which they seek, vague flickers of light ominously illuminating the once-hostel. Villanelle smiles.

 

            “You look old,” she bites back, and then laughs. “I thought this once asked to meet with me alone?”

 

            “You think that I was going to let you meet the client by yourself?” His brow quips up and she can’t help but consider how amusing this expression is, like a father chastising his child for presuming to take the car at night. Villanelle chuckles, and then climbs the stairs.

 

            “I wanted to dress scary. I am an assassin, after-all.”

 

            “Go,” Konstantin orders. Villanelle is unshaken by his dominating voice, she knows she could gladly snap his neck the way a child might a pencil in a fit of rage, but with much more control and much more in the way of style.

 

            The room in which they’re meeting the client sits atop the stairwell and is dark and gloomy, light filtering through cracked blinds in sparse locations, casting light on the dust which coats every surface within the room. Villanelle raises her nose in displeasure at this, declines to sit upon the worn couch across from where their client stands. He is a man of perhaps fifty years, though from the exquisite cut of his suit, something Villanelle appreciates especially, she suspects he might be younger, his aging premature from the stress of a job that pays well but will drive him to drinking and to an early heart attack.

 

            “I thought I asked you to come alone.” The words are directed not at Villanelle, but towards Konstantin. Villanelle pouts.

 

            “Don’t worry about him – he just likes to watch,” she says, and her lips turn up into a half-smile at the way Konstantin’s eyes settle on her with a tone of warning. “Don’t you? Tell the nice man.”

 

            Their patron – for if she is to be an artist, then he must be her patron – goes fair, whiter than his flesh already is, and she wonders if he actually believes that of Konstantin. She’s met ones like that before with a particular fetish for the watching. It didn’t matter for them who was doing the killings, just that it happened. Villanelle had to disagree with this point. If it wasn’t her wielding the knife, then it would be better for it to be someone exquisite. Eve, for instance, though the woman’s name ringing in her mind made something inside of her ache. It was less than a day since her last job, she hadn’t been able to linger near the site waiting for her fantastic Asian woman to show up, and she was angry about that, about being whisked away on a plane by Konstantin so soon after.

 

            “Yes, well.” The patron coughed, cleared his throat, his discomfort apparent. “The job.”

 

            “Tell me about it,” Villanelle coos, her voice low and seductive, a hint of playfulness. The man reaches into his jacket pocket, retrieving a series of photos which he then passes to Villanelle. They are of two women, one of a beautiful, dark skinned woman perhaps thirty five years of age, her face showing the first signs of wear but beautiful none the less, and a second woman who is shown standing beside their client, her amber-hued locks pulled away from a face which wears a false expression of felicity.

 

            “My wife and her lover,” the man informs her. “I would like them gotten rid of – but no one must know that they were together, nor that I had any inclination of her… proclivities.”

 

            Heat floods through Villanelle which she manages only just to contain as she lifts her gaze and nods. “Of course,” Villanelle answers. “I’ll take care of it for you.”

-

 

            He gives her the details to his wife’s schedule, demands that the two women be taken care of separately, and when they’ve not had any recent contact with one another. Villanelle waits until he is away on a Saturday business lunch with a client – a politician after all, she wrinkles her nose at the idea that she should care of such issues – before settling in to work. The wife and the lover are both exquisite women, beautiful women, and Villanelle should not mind knowing how they taste, how they feel, hearing them both falling over to the greatest climax of pleasure beneath her, but she is more anxious to see Eve, and thus to have it be done with. It happens as they are waiting for her to join, naked in one another’s embrace upon the bed where the wife sleeps with her husband, nothing more. The champagne was so easy to dose and neither woman had taken note until it was too late, its hedonistic kiss delivering a final fault to their bloodstreams, taking the last of life, stuttering from their lips. They fell into an easy sleep from which they would never wake. Villanelle did not pity them. She did not see her victims as people whom she should regard with any concern. But the husband. The husband inspired the artistic stirrings within her, the passion of hatred, reminded her of someone else who was a barrier to her happiness, who kept her from that which she desired.

 

            She lets the husband discover them in one another’s embrace, listens to the music of his gasps and his horrified retching and cannot help herself but to laugh. He is quick to turn around at that, and his eyes flood with a registration of both fear and anger as his grip comes to close around her throat. But she only laughs harder at this.

 

            “You’re going… to get piss and shit on your floor, if you kill me here,” she warns. “The bowels release when you die. No helping for it. How will you explain it to your maid?”

 

            The logic of her words and the calm with which she says them are spell enough to make him falter, to loosen his grip, stronger than she had anticipated but easy enough to tend to. A swift raise of her leg in a properly placed locale displaces him for a moment and she drops to the hardwood, throwing her weight at the man in a swift motion which sees him thrown to the floor. He gasps in shock, his pupils dilating, an animal look of survival taking over him. Villanelle is took quick, however, too trained in her art. She presses her knee against his groin and holds the pressure there, increasing, increasing, increasing, registering the pain which floods his face. She could crush the seat of his supposed manhood so swiftly, were she desirous, could completely vanquish that supposition of masculinity. But that is a thought for another day. Here, today, she has her piece to finish, and this is not a part of it. Instead, Villanelle pries open his mouth, and when he tries to shut it she pinches at his nose, leaves him gasping for breath long enough that she can break open the necklace she wears, shoving the tablet into his mouth, forcing him to swallow.

 

            The paralytic is slow to take effect, unlike the poison, and from the way that he writhes in agony until his body is no longer his to control, she knows it must hurt like fire flooding his veins. It makes him no easier to maneuver, simply eliminates his struggle, but his body is still a dead weight which she must drag through the house into the bathroom, laying him naked into the tub.

 

            “You know, there aren’t that many left-handed people in this world,” Villanelle informs him as she sits beside him on the toilet, studying the man, the water flooding over his form. “I don’t usually care to make it look like a suicide, so boring,” she drawls. “But for you, boring fits.”

 

            His eyes go wide, and Villanelle smiles as she reaches over, retrieving the razor from the side of the sink. “Pretty tool,” she muses, holding the heavy weight of it, the fine metal which it had been conceived of, silver, she thinks. The mechanisms to remove the blades are easy to her fingers, but nonetheless she feels the stinging pain as she drags her thumb along the edge just so whilst snapping one out of place.

 

            “Oopsies,” Villanelle says, suckling the blood where it spills and grinning as the crimson stains her teeth, looking at her victim. “Oh well.” She shrugs, running the blade through the water and then on a towel. “Hmm… Right arm first? There’s a good boy.”

 

            His veins split like peas, like beans, popping open deliciously for her, and she drags the razor through with the most especial weight, more to the right than to the left, trembling and stuttering motions that she has practiced many times before for the Twelve. The man cannot cry out, can only weep silent tears as his blood drains from his body into the ever-filling tub.

 

            “You know,” she says to him, “When you die, when you aren’t paralyzed, and in such a painful manner as this, you kick. You fight. Even if you want to die, your body doesn’t. Sometimes, you knock the drain loose, and when everything else from your body falls through, it washes away all of it. The toxins running through your bloodstream, draining out of you.” She pops the drain, smirks at him. “How indignant you will look when they find you, dead after killing your wife and her lover.” She shakes her head, tuts. “That won’t look good, now will it?”

 

            His eyes are fixed on her with an expression of pleading, but it grows weaker, fainter. “Sweet nightmares,” she whispers as the last of the life leaves him, and she stands to depart.

-

            She sends two postcards this time – one for Eve, and the other for Nico.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, and for all of your wonderful comments on the previous chapter, it means so much to me to know that you guys are enjoying the story! I hope that you liked this chapter, I know it's a little longer than usual but I really got into this idea of Villanelle just running away with her jealousy and hatred of Nico. The pieces that inspired today's chapter are Le Sommeil by Gustave Courbet, as well as The Murder of Marat, by Paul Baudry. 
> 
> Just so you guys know I am starting of my semester as of today - however, I have two and a half chapters currently in the process of finishing and revising, so I will be updating as regularly as I'm able. Thank you so much for reading, and let me know what you think!


	5. Chapter Five: Intermission Part One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Villanelle grows tired of being ignored, and decides to take their relationship to another step.

            Konstantin is yelling at her. She knows because his face is scrunched up in that way which means she is supposed to be listening, because what he has to say is Very. Important. Villanelle.

            “Villanelle!”

            She is thinking about ignorance. It is the worst of the ways in which a woman can attempt to seduce another, the laziest. It borders on arrogance, and while Villanelle herself might boast that particular trait for the fact that it is well within her right, she learns that she hates it on Eve. She had given her something beautiful and been snubbed, the glorious presentation ignored, the blatant gift and its immediate tag gone unconsidered. How? She _knows_ how much Eve loves the presents, she’s watched in fascination the way that the woman looked when she unwrapped that which Villanelle had composed for her. She’s getting tired of Eve’s games, of the way that she’s been denied again. And again.

            She would have to teach her a lesson.

            A strike lands against her skin, the reverberation of the blow singing through the room and in her ringing ears. Villanelle blinks, her eyes settling on Konstantin. _Was he still here?_

            “Ow,” Villanelle complains, rubbing her fingers against her cheek. The flesh there is warm from the impact of the blow, blood rushing into the stunned capillaries. Her mouth turns down, frowning as she glanced into the eyes of her handler. His brows are pulled together, his expression tight, skin blotched red in an ugly pattern. _Scary,_ Villanelle muses. She isn’t afraid – he looks more like a cartoon villain, his impatience sharp in his face.

            “You cannot kill the clients!” Konstantin roars. “You’re getting distracted, thinking about her.” _Oh,_ Villanelle thinks. They’re still on this. She sighs, her eyes glazing over again. She’s thinking about what Konstantin had told her about the other women, although it’s Eve that she knows he anticipates is consuming her mind once more. He’s not wrong. But it’s not just about Eve, it’s about this rival trying to take her place. She needs to remind her London fanclub who she is. Villanelle knows her Eve is torn like the body of a gazelle in the mouth of two lions – and Villanelle could claim her half of the carcass, or she could kill the competitor first.

            Ensure the prize first, take her vengeance later, Villanelle decides. _Why not do both?_ She won’t be second to this new woman – she _will_ have Eve.

            -

            The child on the plane kicked the back of her seat incessantly and screamed when its mother refused to allow it a glass of pop that the stewardesses provided. Villanelle soothed herself by imagining the various ways that one could make an airplane into a floating casket – an open window, though too reckless to her person, a hot towel smothering, strangling with a seatbelt, there were endless ways to ease through such a pursuit. Ultimately, when the child’s mother rose to use the restroom, instructing the creature to stay as it was, Villanelle turned with her razor-sharp smile and fixed her eyes onto the child.

            “Your mother is going to leave you in London,” she uttered lowly. “She’s going to abandon you with the grandmother you hate so much, and she is going to go off with the mailman, and live much happier without you,” she informed the child, “and if you do not rest I will come to you in the night, and I will make you into a pudding much faster than your grandmother will.” The creature’s face stilled with the shock of this stranger’s words, but took the threat to heart, and was silent for the remainder of the journey.

-

            Waiting, Villanelle muses, is far worse when one is near to the object of one’s desire, with nothing to detract from the thoughts of that obsession. While she waits, she observes Eve’s neighbors. The couple next-door to her fights the way Eve and Nico have started to, but with less fire. She thinks it has to do with the husband’s lover – a man who stops by after the wife stomps off, their baby in tow. Villanelle can’t help but chuckle from the car where she watches, seat reclined, smoothie in hand. The husband opens the door, his eyes shine bright with something other than the tears in which his wife had departed, and he ushers the lover in, the door shutting flush behind them. Their secret locks away, not so secret as they might think, paths of lights and shadows telling a story they can’t publicly admit.

            Love is _so_ disappointing, she thinks, when normal people are involved. How boring it must have been for Eve, all these years, wearing someone else’s face, pretending like this was the society into which she was meant to slip. When Nico steps into the apartment, she watches him like any good predator, ferile, feline mind circling. She wonders what Eve would think if she gave her this gift, the most precious of all of them. She could lay him at Eve’s doorstep, or upon the bed like a cat, an offering, better than the ring that he had placed on her finger like chains, fatal thing.

            Villanelle’s hand is almost to the door when he steps out again in a rush, his suitcase in tow, and she leans back, deciding that she can wait, though her hand itches with the thought of it, the thought of dispatching yet another barrier. But she is not here for _him._ So she waits, and waits.

            She waited with Nadia, cultivated their relationship, took her place, took her life. Waited in that prison. She waited when they taught her how to shoot properly, when the Twelve took her on, taught her to shoot – she was shit with a gun, shit at waiting. But she would wait for Eve.

            -

            “She’s not coming.” Konstantin’s voice breaks through the sound of the radio as he slides into the car. Villanelle pouts.

            “Maybe she is just running late.”

            “They know you’re here,” Konstantin warns her – his voice has lost the anger that it had before she boarded the plane. Now it was slow, the way that you chide a child. The way a parent speaks to a toddler who has refused to listen. She rolls her eyes, casts her gaze back out the window. A cat sits in the window across the street, staring at her. It jumps gracefully from the dresser on which it is perched and falls out of view. “It was a stupid thing, coming here.”

            “They,” Villanelle repeats miserably as the cat disappears. “The Twelve?”

            “Probably,” he answers as he pulls the door shut beside her, his tone dismissive, glib. “The British,” he corrects. “MI-6.” Her mind goes to the woman for whom she waits.

            “Eve,” Villanelle utters. Saying her name feels like an orgasm as it comes off her lips, hot and wet, the culmination of desire and sweet, blissful release. Eve knows she’s here. Something which approximates elation, which comes near to the way that a kill feels, the syllables slipping from her mouth are as the last crying words of a dying man, sweeter nectar still, and _Eve knows she’s here._

            “Where is she?” Villanelle demands. _Why hasn’t she come._ The thought tugs at her mind as a puppeteer pulls on strings, derailing her consciousness until it focuses on a center point.

            “She is not your concern,” Konstantin warns in a low voice. “Go home, Villanelle.”

            He moves to open the door, but such proceedings are halted with the full weight of Villanelle’s strength pressed against his torso, a blade secured against the edge of the man’s throat. There is a wilderness in the woman’s eyes that he would have done well to not forget in those moments was the closest approximation to a natural state, one of the few things about her that wasn’t simply a façade, a repetition of what she saw in others. The woman could hear his heart beating, faster than was advisable for a man his age, but not necessarily a rhythm of complete fear – Konstantin had resigned himself to death long ago. If she was to be his deliverance, it would be somewhat poetic – the loss of life at the hands of that which one created. Konstantin had not made her, but he had given her this life the way a mother births her child into being and oh, she could not help but smirk at the sweet irony of how it would be to remove him from this world.

            “Stay,” she invites. Her tone has that sweetness which she has learned to affect after the observance of children speaking to mothers when they are in want of something, it is so almost accurate and yet no. There is an edge to her tone, a meaning of danger. The smile evaporates as something so liquid, so without physical substance is wont to do when applied to great heat, her blade digs at the flesh just a moment deeper, a warning. “Tell me where Eve is.”

            “She isn’t here,” Konstantin answers. Villanelle thinks she detects a note of smugness in his tone, a hint of pleasure. “She’s out looking for her Ghost.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! Sorry that it's been so very long, this semester has been a bit hectic. However, I am currently in finals week and have a break coming up where I'll be able to spend time writing. I hope to post a couple more updates after this one, and thank you so, so much for being patient. I hope that you enjoyed, and let me know what you thought of this chapter as we get closer to the interaction we've wanted most - Eve and Villanelle.


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